Yes, airports have nofly zones over and around them especially for drones. Now young kids and enthusiast don’t seem to know this. And sometimes they fly into the nofly zone. The radars pick it up as a flying vehicle but they have no idea it was a drone. They would think it’s a helicopter because earlier when drones were just becoming a norm, the radars did not have filters for signals from drones. And it was marked as an unidentified object.

Any airport airside would have to shut down the airport and consider this as a high security risk, most probably an impending attack by terrorists. But ofcourse no one could see the drone. Not even the airside operations staff. But finally one of the cars found the drone and the threat was neutralized. And the airport resumed services again.

This is not the only time it has happened, when drones were becoming a norm this used to happen a lot. And then ATC’s had to put a filter for signals from drones.

Yeah, I think this was especially unusual because it was clearly an intentional act. The drone flew around just long enough to close the airport, then wend and hid somewhere, and repeated this all day long.

Apparently they have now spent millions of Pounds on adding new anti-drone systems to help stop this happening again.

The fact this caused so many delays and cancellations was astounding. I always thought they were going to try and block out certain frequencies used by drones but I am not sure this is possible. Copycats will be the next problem!